Panning Your Drums

Make your drums sound like a monster attacking you from all sides.

Technique #1:
Basics of Panning Drums

Kicks and Snares
When you’re panning your drum sounds, you want to make sure that the most impactful elements remain at the core of your beat. Therefore, I advise you to leave all the kicks (including 808 kick drums) and snare sounds at the center. In other words, you don’t need to apply any panning to them.

Hi Hats, Cymbals & Percussion
Around this center, you can pan the other drums and percussion samples. Usually, I pan the hi hats, cymbals, tambourines and shakers, so the more basic percussion instruments, a little to the right and/or left of center. If 100 is hard left  hard right (=completely all the way) and 0 is center, anything between -/+ 10 and -/+ 30 will do.

Toms & Melodic Percussion
For the more melodic and exotic percussion elements, like toms, bongos, congas etc. I suggest a more radical panning, like between -/+ 45 and -/+ 90.

Check in Mono
To find out what works the best for you, it’s best to just play around and experiment with the panning settings. Be careful with panning elements completely left or right, because they may disappear entirely when your song is being played back on a mono source or if 1 speaker is broken.

Technique #2:
Maintain the Balance

No matter what and how you pan, maintaining a ‘healthy’ balance is always very important for keeping the power of the song. So, if you decide to pan something a little to the right, you should pan something else a little to the left. But don’t go crazy about this, we’re talking about a ‘healthy’ balance. So, for example panning something 40 to the right and something else 35 to the right won’t do any damage to your track. In fact, it might sound more natural!

You can compare it to sitting on a seesaw. If you have too much weight on one side the effect is gone. Always make sure your mix and panning is in balance on both sides of the stereo spectrum. 

Technique #3:
Layering Sounds

There’s one simple technique that is incredible for strengthening clap and snare sounds:

Layer three equal drum sounds on top of each other and pan one of them close to the far right (between + 80 / 90), one of them close to the far left (between – 80 / 90) and leave one exactly in the middle. This will create a very spacious and impressive sound. Try it out yourself!

You can (and should) also use this layering technique to create new sounds. Putting 2 different snares sounds on top of each other will create a completely new snare sound. You can also do this with other sounds. I often put a short crash on top of my snare to create an explosive effect. Or even layer a percussion sound like a tambourine on top of the snare. The same goes for any other sound you can layer. I hardly make a beat without putting a 808 kick under my normal kick.

Phasing
A good idea is to slightly pitch the left and right drum samples differently to avoid phase issues.

Phasing is when you put multiple identical sounds on top of each other and it creates a very ugly feedback sound. Because the wave forms are identical, they might also cancel each other out (being muted) or create other very unpleasant sound effects. Avoid phasing at all costs.

Dr. Dre is particularly fond of the drum layering technique and often uses this in his beats. A great example of the wide layered clap sound can be heard in this Dr. Dre production:

Technique #4:
Panning Instruments

A similar technique works very well for some non-percussive instruments. If you have a tight chord playing instrument (for example a pad synth or strings) with a solid and supporting role, but you don’t want them taking up too much space. Simply copy the pattern and again, pan one of them really close to the right (between + 90 / 99) and one of them really close to the left (between – 90 / 99).

This way, you can save lots of room in the center of your beat. This space can be used for your main melody line or lead vocal.  

Feel free to use my Free Drum Samples to start experimenting with panning your sounds right now.

Continue to the next Quick Tip:
Crescendos: How to make your hooks explode!